Agile: A reminder of the benefits of colocation

Sometimes it’s the seemingly small details of the agile/XP approach to software development that make it so much more effective than the traditional approach.

I was reminded of this last week with regards to having co-located teams with the developers, BAs, QAs and the business people all sitting in close proximity.

I was working on the auto completion function for one of our screens and the QA on the team, who was sitting next to me, asked me if I could look through the acceptance criteria that he was working on.

This conversation was almost perfectly on cue because I was just about at the point where I had covered all the happy path cases and needed to understand the other paths. While looking through the acceptance criteria we needed some clarification with regards to exactly what the business wanted.

We went over to where the BAs were sitting and posed the question. Luckily they had just had the conversation with the business people and were able to explain the intent behind the criteria.

Interestingly writing this has made me realise that there are a couple of points in our process where more communication would make things flow more smoothly but seeing the speed with which we were able to go from confusion over a requirement to complete understanding was a really great reminder for me.